'Seed keeper' Phil Seneca strives for hearty stock

Doug Oster

Tuesday

Apr 24, 2012 at 12:01 AMApr 24, 2012 at 7:04 AM

Seneca is the "seed keeper" and founder of Good Mind Seeds, a company that offers an eclectic variety of flowers and vegetables bred for toughness and genetic diversity. Seed-keeping is different from seed storage, he says.

Phil Seneca is a gentle soul.

As we sit at the kitchen table of a farmhouse that has been in his family for four generations, he carefully slips a piece of paper under a ladybug and gently carries it to the front door, where it flew away.

Seneca is the "seed keeper" and founder of Good Mind Seeds, a company that offers an eclectic variety of flowers and vegetables bred for toughness and genetic diversity. Seed-keeping is different from seed storage, he says.

"Every single year, the weather is changing, the soil is changing, species are dying out. If we don't have the strongest gene combinations from our crops being selected every year, our crops won't learn how to be in the new world they wake up into the next year."

That means careful selection of plants in the field and using plants that are the same variety but different enough to grow under a wide range of conditions.

The quiet 24-year-old turns intense when talk turns to genetically modified organisms. He thinks it's "the corporate takeover of food." Seneca can't stomach companies that are splicing genes of other species into plants, then patenting them.

"We have not seen one case of one genetically modified product benefiting anybody except the corporate interests behind its creation," he says.

This is what drove him to create a collection of seeds that are grown locally and under tough conditions. The self-taught plant breeder is working on all sorts of interesting varieties using conventional breeding techniques.

"I'm offering people seed that is from authentic sources that has been tested in very real situations with no tilling, chemicals, compost or irrigation."

That's right –– no watering or digging. It's called dry farming, and one of his biggest successes last year was a tomato called "Punta Banda." He thinks its origins are Spanish.

"It's the most drought-tolerant tomato I've ever grown," he says. "The hotter, dryer and brighter it got, the more they loved it."

It grows about 3 feet tall and produces golf-ball-sized saladette paste tomatoes. "The skin is thin enough to eat fresh but thick enough to slide off when canning," he adds.

Punta Banda doesn't have superb disease resistance, however.

"I'm working on that," he says with a laugh.

Seneca's love of plants can be traced to his family. His grandfather farmed corn, tomatoes and strawberries at the family homestead in Marshall, Pa. On walks through the kitchen garden or nearby woods, his mother educated him about the plants they saw together.

"My earliest memories are gardening," he says with a smile.

The history of botany before colonization plays a large role in the way he looks at plant-breeding. Back then, each field of crops would be slightly different. They could lend each other their strengths over the decades as they evolved in their own micro climates through pollination.

"That kind of diversity is gone," he says.

When plants are too similar and things go bad, the whole crop can fail. Think of the Irish Potato Famine or the early-1970s blight that wiped out hundreds of millions of bushels of corn. Both cases point out the problems of inadequate genetic diversity.

Many of the plants Seneca offers are heirlooms, but he thinks people misunderstand that term, thinking they are better than hybrid varieties.

"Every heirloom at one point in time was a hybrid, in my opinion. Plants have sex. It's just the way the world works."

As gardeners, we're used to ordering the exact variety we know, love or want to discover. But he offers another interesting way of thinking about the garden:

What if you had a bunch of different varieties that, when planted, were not 100 percent predictable? But you always got what you need and what you're looking for. Would that work for you?

"That's the kind of thing that I think is very valuable and has more resiliencies for the future. People aren't willing to think of it that way," he says.

Another winner in his trial garden is "Hog Heart Paste," a big meaty heart-shaped tomato with dry flesh and what he describes as superb flavor. It's saddled with the leaf-wilt gene, but "it tastes good enough not to care," Seneca says.

"Rat Tail" radishes are not grown for their roots but for the tasty young seed pods that appear after the tiny pinkish purple flowers. The pretty blossoms also attract beneficial insects. Seneca plants one or two in squash beds to help deal with bad bugs, harvesting some of the pods for the kitchen and then the seed for next year's crop.

Ground cherries are closely related to tomatillos, but they are smaller with a yellow husk. They are a very sweet annual plant and easiest of the nightshade family to grow, according to Seneca. They taste like something between a strawberry, pineapple and tomato, with each fruit having a slightly different flavor, he says.

Half his catalog is filled with interesting tomatoes, but he also offers greens, herbs, grains and other plants. Seneca is on a mission to provide crops that will grow in variable conditions with seeds that can be saved year after year. Gardeners are buying more than just seed, he says.

"They are going to get better nutrition, they're going to have an easier time gardening and they going to be taking part in a tradition that goes back to the very beginning of time," he says.

Information, catalog: Good Mind Seeds, www.goodmindseeds.org. Seneca is always looking for new varieties and is interesting in trading. Email him at goodmindseeds@gardener.com.

Email Doug Oster at doster(at)post-gazette.com; Twitter: @dougoster1.

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